Builder Confidence Hits 7-Year High, New Home Sales Rising

In a recent interview for RISMedia, David Schoner, a national leading expert in new-home sales and marketing, and 17-year vice president of Coldwell Banker, NRT, responsible for all New Homes Division operations, detailed the benefits of working in new home sales to agents.

“There are a lot of positive things happening and new-home sales are clearly on the way back up,” he said. “When I see the limited inventory and bidding wars going on in so many markets, I think about what a great solution new homes offer. Agents are busy writing up offers, but are they actually closing deals? Buyers are getting frustrated—instead of paying top dollar and living with compromises, a new home can give them exactly what they want.”

For Mark Woodroof, partner at Houston-based Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Gary Greene, the inventory shortage is making new-home construction another critical profit center in the new age of real estate. “The inventory situation should not have snuck up on us,” explains Woodroof. “We were building less than 500,000 homes, when the market calls for 1.5 million a year. The new-home builders will not be able to fix this in a year, but it will be a continued growth area. There is a 30 percent increase in housing starts so far this year. However, we are adding 10,000 people a month with immigration—so new homes alone won’t get it done.”

Derived from a monthly survey that NAHB has been conducting for 25 years, the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months as “good,” “fair” or “poor.” The survey also asks builders to rate traffic of prospective buyers as “high to very high,” “average” or “low to very low.” Scores from each component are then used to calculate a seasonally adjusted index where any number over 50 indicates that more builders view conditions as good than poor.

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